My "hello world" for a new stack is always a version of Worm. Somewhere between Life and your Swarm, Worm wanders around looking for food and water, trying to avoid birds and other issues. Each round the worm survives it grows by a segment. If it doesn't get food or water, it is reduced a segment. And so on. Your Swarm is a few levels up from my iterations, totally inspirational! Thanks!
Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#62I've been working on a surprisingly similar project for the last week: plants grow cells on a grid by executing a raw chunk of memory according to a simple instruction set. I'm aiming more for an evolution simulator, where each plant gets a 1kb brain that is randomized a little when a new plant is spawned.
Most plants right now settle into a simple goto loop that places the requisite cells to survive and then spam seeds until they die. I have seen some interesting variety in body plans emerge where plants sort into discrete species regionally. I'm hoping to eventually get decision making to emerge organically. If things go well this system is theoretically capable of sexual selection (and maybe fisherian runaway) but that's a pipe dream right now.
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#63Is it possible to reset the source once you've started modifying it?
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#64That's really cute, it reminds me that Will Wright (creator of The Sims) has referenced this book "The Ants", by Bert Holldobler in multiple occasions as a key inspiration for his games (and in particular SimAnt) and systems thinking. Did you come across that during your research phase or had you not heard about it? I haven't read it yet, but maybe someday I'll get around to it.
Will Wright gave at least one great lecture at SIGGRAPH. Wonderful thinker and communicator. #ACM plz unlock this culture.
Ants have fascinated me from a young age, I’d construct a viewing platform so I could watch the hive at work.
My favorite were the carpenter ants, so smart. It feels like they have a theory of mind. I didn’t hurt them, but if you disturbe their nest under a board, the efficiency and expediency they would exhibit while collecting their young was fascinating.
*edit, I meant to ask if you had any other book recommendations?
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#65The disclosure route is cut off at the bottom: https://dev.moment.com/disclosures
I cannot scroll to the Governing Law section
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#66That's really cute, it reminds me that Will Wright (creator of The Sims) has referenced this book "The Ants", by Bert Holldobler in multiple occasions as a key inspiration for his games (and in particular SimAnt) and systems thinking. Did you come across that during your research phase or had you not heard about it? I haven't read it yet, but maybe someday I'll get around to it.
Speaking of SimAnt, I soon discovered the bug that by moving into the top corner, the black ants would conquer all squares with no intervention from that one sideways and downwards and too easily win the game.
Still, it was fun just messing around with the ants, watching the trails, and chasing spiders by calling forth all ants.
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#67Make sure you lets those agents relax and recharge at https://vibesprings.net
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, I'm the one who built this particular challenge! I had no clue, but thanks for the book lead! It didn't come up directly, but SimCity 2000 and especially SimCity 4 had a huge impact on me growing up / I still spin up SimCity 4 from time to time, so I imagine there's a massive indirect influence haha.
This is exceptionally beautiful. What did you use to build it? Vanilla JS?
This is actually all built in nextjs/react, though the initial sketches of the sim had no visualization and were just running in my terminal using bunjs
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#69This sounds a lot like a task of 2004 ICFPC Programming contest: ants, pheromone trails, only local vision, etc:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060709155354/http://www.cis.up...
I can't see the rules of this challenge, but it sounds really darn close.
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#70That's really cute, it reminds me that Will Wright (creator of The Sims) has referenced this book "The Ants", by Bert Holldobler in multiple occasions as a key inspiration for his games (and in particular SimAnt) and systems thinking. Did you come across that during your research phase or had you not heard about it? I haven't read it yet, but maybe someday I'll get around to it.
Will Wright gave at least one great lecture at SIGGRAPH. Wonderful thinker and communicator. #ACM plz unlock this culture. Ants have fascinated me from a young age, I’d construct a viewing platform so I could watch the hive at work. My favorite were the carpenter ants, so smart. It feels like they have a theory of mind. I didn’t hurt them, but if you disturbe their nest under a board, the efficiency and expediency th…
Well, I'm currently reading through "Designing Virtual Worlds" by Richard Bartle. He's known for being one of the creators of MUD (multi-user dungeon). I'm not far along enough to make a judgement on the quality of the contents, but I keep seeing the book title pop up everywhere so it seems important.